DONE.

Oh fuck. Now I have to prepare my class for tomorrow. Heh. In-class writing! DONE.

Unfortunately for you, I just whipped up a fresh batch of mad.

Well, I'm down to one paper. One tiny little, three page (god bless you, E.Y.), tiny tiny paper. Unfortunately, I can no longer read.

I finally got around to putting that Kerry/Edwards bumpersticker on my car.

Here are some things that I may or may not have written on students' papers:

1) "I googled your paper. Take it as a compliment."

2) "Good job. Talk in class. Also, change your major to Literature and apply to graduate school."

3) "Your paper does not exactly reek of effort."

4) "Yeah, when it gets right down to it, basically all of literature is about sex and death. The best lit is about both."

5) "Not only is this in poor taste, it doesn't even make sense."



Oh man, I really want to get these papers back before Thanksgiving break, which means, by tomorrow at 8am. And I have 7 left, a freakin' all-star lineup of kids who have gotten As on basically all of their papers so far. (Actually, it's more than that, but I'm rationalizing not handing back several papers on time as they were not handed in on time. So fuck 'em.) But the question is, does my desire to get rid of all these papers outweigh the desire to not fucking be grading papers anymore? And to spend time instead reading in passing?

Giggity giggity

Have you ever met anyone so repulsive that the very fabric of the universe was rent around this person? That you, despite seeing him across the parking lot, were pretty sure, somewhere in that reptilian brainstem, that he was lurking in your back seat, ready to grab your throat once you were out of town?

Point/Counterpoint

Point: Ignorance is Bliss
I am still on vacation from the media. All media. No radio, no tv news (read: PBS), no Salon. No Google News. I know Arafat died, I know Powell resigned. I have not had to look at Smirking Monkey since Nov. 3. It is great. I can think about things that don't immediately depress me, such as... oh wait.

Counterpoint: One Can Only Sublimate So Far
Last night I had a dream wherein I was screaming about something the Bush administration had done and throwing things (potted plants? paperweights?) across a doctor's office.

Battle Scar Galactica

Last week I cut my hand open, right on the side under the pinky, opening a bottle of pills because the edge where the foil gets torn off is usually all jagged. It was pretty healed, but then Friday I did it again, a bigger, deeper cut this time. You have no idea how stretchy the skin on your palm is until it hurts to stretch or scrunch it.

Anyhow, I'm hoping it leaves a scar, so that when I'm 94, I can show it to my grandchildren and say "See this? Your Gam* worked in a pharmacy 70 years ago, and cut her hand on a bottle."** Scars are cool, because they're like tattoos, only painful accidental.


* or whatever I go by. My aunt recently decided that she wants her grandchildren to call her "Oma." To Sam, the 2-year-old, this is indistinguishable from the word "Elmo." Mother of your father, or small annoying red muppet with the mentality of a 3-year-old widely regarded by most early generations of Sesame Street viewers as a filthy show-stealer? Take your pick.

** Then, of course, I'll have to explain that a pharmacy used to be a place you could actually walk into, rather than some warehouse in Minnesota owned by your insurance company.

Balls a la Wall

Well, today I finally snapped out of my work-funk. I had become clumsy and forgetful, which, I realized yesterday, is likely the result of residual election-depression, and the recent revelation that my grandma has a brain tumor.* But I had been a fucking disaster. Everything I did was wrong. I was discovering new mistakes, mistakes that nobody had ever made before. "How the fuck did that happen?" mistakes.

But anyhow, today I snapped out of it, and it's a GOOD GODDAMN THING I DID, because this morning the printer stopped working. Now, the printer is pretty important in the whole scheme of things. It's not necessary, really - you can still technically fill prescriptions - record in the computer that you're doing it, dispense the drugs, get price information from the insurance company. It's not like the computer itself going down, or the modem, or various insurance companies going offline unexpectedly (which has and does happen). But the printer does a lot of the low-end grunt work, that, when the printer is down, the technicians must do by hand. Eventually it got to the point where we could get it to print onto paper, but not onto labels; this resulted in a whole hell of a lot of cutting and taping suddenly being necessary. A whole. hell. of a lot.

I often like the whole bunker-mentality thing, but this was ridiculous. Apparently I'm obsessive-compulsive about right angles, and today was not conducive to right angles. When I work Saturdays and am the only tech there, the book of refill stickers is gorgeous, all perfect and angular and straight.


*It's probably benign, and it's probably going to not be the death of her. We find out more on Tuesday. Still, I've been a little freaked.

Jane: Desired by the People at Her School and Work

Here is a list of reasons that I love my dog:

1) She can crawl like a fire dog, despite being a mutt with traces of every breed known to God except for dalmation.

2) She knows all sorts of unusual commands, like "downstairs," "off-the-bed!," and "fuck off." She is also not unwilling to cock her head like a dog-treat-box-model dog when she hears a word that she likes, like "Shiloh" (her cousin dog) or "park."

3) She is Oscar to Lou's Felix, or Felix to Lou's Oscar, depending on which one of those guys was the mellow goofy one. That's the one she is.

4) Her name fits perfectly into the "Jo-o-oy - and pain/Lou Dog - and Jane" song.

5) She sighs when she settles in for a nap, and her whole body deflates. She sounds like an old man unbuttoning his pants after overeating at Thanksgiving.

6) She is very good at imploring. She does that thing where she keeps her head level, but looks up at you, which shows the whites underneath her irises a little bit and makes her look like a freakin angel.

7) She has an attention span that is better than most 8-year-olds' in the public school system these days.

8) She has absolutely no set schedule at all - she can go to sleep or get up at any hour - except for the second (or fifth) wind that she always gets at midnight.

9) When we go to the woods, she likes to run up ahead on the path and hide behind logs until Lou comes trotting by, then she jumps on his head.

10) When playing ball, occasionally this thing will happen where one side of her nose will get all scrunched and puffed up. It's the part of her skin that has whiskers growing out of it. I don't have any idea what it means.

11) She is bow-legged like a bulldog.

12) When she needs to, she can entertain herself by throwing a ball into the air and then running after it, often down the stairs.

13) She understands pointing. Maybe most dogs can, but I'm content to assume that this just makes her a genius.

14) She loves to lay down in small creeks or snow, and loves to wade through larger bodies of water, but regards baths as torture.

15) Her body is about 1/4 scruff.

16) You cannot knock this dog over. When I tried to teach her to roll over, it was a wrestling match that I lost. It was like trying to tip over a Weeble, or a helicopter. You could get her shoulder on the floor, but the back feet stayed firmly planted.

17) Her nose has two very faint little brown stripes running down the middle of it, between her nostrils.

18) She is reigning house champion of staring contests.

Do you mind? I'm trying to live in a cloud here!

The Bush-panic e-mails have already started. No, I will not sign your petition. Can't you see my fingers in my ears? La la la, everything's fine. I am taking a vacation from the outside world of "news" and "politics" and such trivalities. La la la. Yasser who now?

It helps that I'm swamped, but I fucking hate being swamped.

All Hot and Stupid

If I were a porn star, my stage name would be Foxy Moron.

Ooh La La

Today I wanted to wear all black to class, because for once the way I dress could be used to express how I feel. However, the only black pants I have are rather bootylicious, on account of having been bought to wear while waitressing, because bootyliciousness tends to be good for tips. So I ended up achieving an effect of "Very Sad Woman Who Also Would Very Much Like to Sleep with You." The ass factor was mitigated somewhat by a long sweater, but still, I might need to bring a firehose. And Lord help us if it's too warm for the sweater.

I've never wanted a nickel so bad in my life.

Well, that's it - I've decided that I'm just going to sit here and cry until he's not president anymore. If that means crying for another four years, I'll just have to become a science exhibit and charge admission.

Have I mentioned that I've been up since 5? am? And really, awake since about 4am? That might perhaps have something to do with the above sentiment. "I'm tired" doesn't really cover it. Working the polls actually helped me avoid the barrage of election coverage all day, which is for the best; it was like hanging out in the boiler room during the big game. I couldn't have stood being on the field today, and even now, when the results are coming in, I sneak away from it and write melodramatic blog posts.

Kind of wandered away from that sports metaphors there. Sorry, champs. Barely functional right now.

I AM A BUNDLE OF MONKEYS!

At the training last week, they made it sound like we'd not even get a chance to sit down, we'd be so busy tomorrow. At the meeting tonight, they made it sound like I could knit a whole afghan and maybe a twinset to boot. Given that I'll be in what will likely be a very Republican district, I'm hoping for the latter, but it would be nice if it was a bit of a cat rodeo for the whole day. And they've taken away the opportunity for jerks to come in and challenge likely democratic voters, so the potential for violent confrontations just went down a lot.